Wednesday, August 2, 2017

If the Christian church is in crisis, the Faith need not be!

There is a encyclopaedia full of legitimate reasons
why Christian churches are finding their heart, mind, soul and buildings
gasping in Cheyne stokes breathing, just before their final breath.

As ‘prosletyzing’ agents for evangelizing the gospel,
at least from reading some of the writing of “Paul” the convert from the
Damascus Road, these ‘churches’ gathered small groups of people to meet and to
pray, to reflect and to give voice to, in some cases, opposition to the current
governor, government or a ruling that was unjust. Different from synagogues,
yet borrowing from the “prophets” of the Old Testament in their teachings,
these places of worship often gave refuge from various forms of oppression, and
trained disciples to “spread the word” of the promise, the hope and the caritas
and forgiveness of new life, as followers of the Risen and Resurrected Christ,
following the Crucifixion.

Sin and the chains of its imprisonment, for the person
and the community’s relationship to God, were historically highly defined,
strictly monitored and, if and when discovered, severely punished by the church.
In fact, restraining laws like the “eye for an eye,” were needed to limit the
vengeance and the punishment inflicted upon offenders. Apocryphal stories of virgin
birth, and healings even miracles were embedded in the litany of magnets to
attract and to sustain faith in neophytes whose credence was another of the
many tests of loyalty and obedience.

As the years and the centuries passed, people like
Roman emperors, decided to convert, and require their subjects to follow their
example; creeds and the seeds of a theology of a new faith were birthed from
human, yet inspired by God, minds and pens, and enforced often by laws and
arms. Church fathers, like Ignatius, and Augustine bared their thoughts and
their souls’ failures, as the parameters of evil grew and were more clearly
defined. Power, both the power of originating dogma and of enforcing that
dogma, became concentrated in a single person, the theological basis of which decision
was mined in the gospel words, “Peter, upon this rock I will build my
church”….and the Pope and the supporting infrastructure were generated.

Rules, then, about things the church fathers
considered significant, borrowed from the original Decalogue about acts deemed
offensive to God like murder, envy, blaspheme and attitudes like honouring
one’s parents were expanded into specific liturgy including the sanctity of
marriage. Human sexuality, as the church fathers conceived of it, was at the
centre of the church’s fixation.

Augustine’s fixation with his own sexual “sins” remain
a cornerstone of this fixation, and a signature of both the early “power” and
also the failure of the early church. Far from following “natural order and
law” as was the premise of church teaching in other areas, the church’s
ambition and need for control of the parishioners gobbled up an attempt to
impose strict “moral” laws on human sexuality. Purity, chastity, and even
celibacy, (at least from Paul) were the preferred and honoured states of human
sexuality. In order to put fences around the “good” behaviour and segregate it
from the “bad” behaviour, marriage as performed by the church leadership, was
defined, and monitored as a sacred sacrament, like a threshold through which all
must pass to enable procreation.

As these early teachings were all promulgated by men,
and given Augustine’s personal angst about his own moral failures, and Paul’s
earlier celibacy attested, male dominance (clearly and inextricably joined to
female submission) prevailed. Illegitimate children and the women who delivered
them were banished. Sex outside of the marriage was considered a deep and
profound sin, and the church’s willingness and even is capacity to forgive was
restricted to the secrecy afforded top officialdom, primarily to protect the
male “establishment” that had been barnacled onto the structure, the laws, the
creeds and the notion of discipleship that had grown inside and been
promulgated outside the sanctuary.

If history were able to recover and reclaim all those
whom the church hierarchy banished, killed, deported, and otherwise officially
excommunicated, and gather them together, there would not be enough cathedrals
to hold such armies. These “undesireables” would vastly outnumber the current
population that continues to attend.

Although the specific rules and expectations may have
been modified slightly, (now marrying divorced and gay individuals, for
example) the tradition of top-down, hierarchical absolute authority remains one
of, if not the most important, hallmarks of the church establishment.
Petitioning for marriage annulments, for example, continues to this day.
Divorce, one of the many consequences of failed marriages, continues to be
looked down upon by the official church, including banning from the opportunity
to receive the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Divorcees, regardless of the
reasons for the breakdown of the marriage, continue to be considered “sinful”
for having broken their “sacred” marriage vows.

Ironically, however, the church itself has
demonstrably failed to keep the vows of charity and compassion and forgiveness
that remain the cornerstones of any valid faith worthy of the name. Pleading
for the poor, giving voice to the condemned in prison, while clearly worthy of an
expression of the Christian faith, are not risking the kind of pushback that
would come from a faith protest against the fullness of the injustice of the
criminal system, where the power of the state is deployed in vengeance, anger,
racism and narcissism with few, if any, repercussions.

The penitential, (the act of confessing one’s sins to
a clergy and the granting of absolution) remains an integral liturgical
component of the church’s faith expression. However, whether it is a mere band aid
for misdeeds or a symbolic act of forgiveness, it is clearly not considered by
most who administer or those who enter, to be a viable expression of either
forgiveness or repentance. Symbols, upon which the church depends for much of
its “language” to the parishioners, has either lost much of its meaning or
truly never had a deep and profound significance for most except the most
deeply engaged spiritually.

Genuflecting, wearing crosses, with or without a
crucified Jesus, celebrating Eucharist the bread and wine either of
transubstantiation (being the Body and Blood of Jesus) or mere symbol, baptism, the “initiation” rite, and of course
both Christmas, the birth of Jesus, and Good Friday and Easter, the crucifixion
and resurrection respectively….plus many of the days that commemorate the lives
of saints, and other holy days such as the Day of the Transfiguration, are all
an integral part of the “tradition” the church has worked hard to preserve. It
has also worked hard to renew each with new life, on each successive commemoration.

And in addition to the “authority” issue, yet
certainly linked to it, is the issue of tradition itself and the theological
notion of revelation. Whether there has been a single revelation from God,
through his Son Jesus Christ, or whether revelation of the truth of God
continues past the literal words of the New Testament, has occupied the
prayers, readings reflections and writings of many theologians over the
centuries. And, naturally, contemporary opinion is divided. It is also divided
over ceremonial processes like the Latin Mass (versus the native language of
the people in the specific church) and over books outlining liturgical practice
(original from Cromwell, for example, or contemporary. And this latter is not
merely a matter of words; it is also a matter of theology, stressing the
sinfulness of the worshipper or not.

So, with ever traditional practice and liturgical
guideline, as well as with organizational structure (exclusively male clergy,
for example) even with or without any clergy, churches have winnowed their
numbers into denominations, some through merging into a new unity, others
through a dividing into separate theologies, liturgies, and role and importance
of Scripture.

The mystery of God, too, is explored with very
different emphases, some churches stressing the “king” (metaphor), others the
healer, still others the shepherd, and still others the teacher. Whether or not
a clergy is “needed” as a ‘medium’ between the humans and their God is another
of many hotly debated topics, and reasons for some ecclesial identities.

The power and authority of God, as originally
conceived by the Jews, documented in the many historic and prophetic stories of
the Old Testament, along with the Decalogue, is another of the many nuggets of
systematic theology that attempts to wrestle with the question of the relation
of humans to God. Are we, for example, servants, evangelists, students,
mendicants or monks, sisters or nuns, prophets or poets, choir members or
clergy…Monasteries and Convents have tutored and raised millions of and women
in a usually celibate life of poverty, chastity, charity and prayer and
worship. They also have provided spiritual role models like Francis of Assisi,
and Mother Theresa who spent much of her life working with lepers in Calcutta
and has recently been declared a Saint by Pope Francis.

Another question that divides people in Christian churches
is the age old question of salvation: “by faith” as Luther taught, by works as
James writes, by simplicity and humility and sharing a common community
dedicated to the “light” of God. Some churches emphasize the Pauline edict, “We
have all sinned and come short of the Glory of God.” Others start with the
concept that within every person “there is that of God”….

Of course, like every other organization, churches
need money to provide heat, light, space and any other facilities like books
for education and for worship, clergy salaries and pensions etc. and for
building maintenance. And, as in most human organizations, those who write the
biggest cheques wield the greatest power in the decision-making among members.
Add to this nefarious aspect, another: that in every human group, there are
those who assume (demand, expect, demonstrate, or inherit) power over questions
that might otherwise require the participation of all members. These people
serve as gate-keepers over whether newcomers are welcomed, tolerated, alienated
or asked to leave. They also often dominate discussions of potential church
decisions, of which there are many more than one might expect: wall colours,
carpet colour, new hymnbooks, new musical instruments, stained glass design and
location, new furnaces, new altars and crosses, whether to hold shared meals,
times of special services like Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day. And while the
work would ideally be shared among many, as in most human organizations, the
small “few” (usually less than 10% of the total number of people attending)
carry the burden of what some call stewardship of the church itself.

Sexuality, money and the deployment of power and
authority are three “petards” on which the institution founders. And they are
all of the church’s own making. There is an argument that posits all three are
really only one issue, the issue of power and authority. And here is a place
where Christians could take a serious look at the concept adopted by the Jewish
community, that they are unable to determine, discern, analyse, or in any other
way “know” the mind and desires of God. There is a realism, a fundamental
truth, that really cannot be dismissed by any argument, in this position.

And
this truth underlies everything the Jewish community undertakes from endless
discernment, discussion, debate and reflection over Torah, to the celebration
of the many occasions that have dotted the Jewish calendar for centuries
including the foods, the lights/candles, the hymns, the prayers and the
readings. Jewish high holidays fill each year, offering many opportunities for
their children to experience their history and tradition, as if initiation to
their “tribe” cannot be contained in a single or a couple of rites of passage.
Of course, the Bar/Bat Mitzvah continues as a prescribed and readily followed
passage from childhood to adolescence and another level/degree of maturity,
including all of the expectations of that stage of one’s life.

Not “knowing” the mind of God is both liberating and
provocative of interpretation, similar to another of the Jewish concepts of
tsim tsum, the ‘withdrawal of God’ in order for the universe to be
‘created’….God’s Omnipotence, from this perspective, does not include
dominance, but the confidence and the humility to withdraw when appropriate.
Herein lies a significant diversion from much of the theory and praxis of
Christianity.

Rather than posit as a starting place the fundamental
notion of human innate and indisputable evil, as if it came from the womb, and
then engineering all ensuing theory and praxis to “redeem” the lost sinner,
this initial concept accepts the far more tenable, sustainable, honourable and
hopeful view that evil is not a trait of birth and that evil is learned from
experience. The church, then, in a single mis-step, essentially links its
belief system to the geopolitical bases of danger, threats and the need for both reformation and redemption.
There seems to have been no real reconciliation with the maxim, “God don’t make
no Junk” and that God’s love of humans is unconditional, unrestrained and
indiscriminate. The institutional rebuttal is that is it through the Cross and
the Resurrection that God forgives all sin, and demonstrates that unconditional
love for all. And yet, why would such a proposition not also hold if the
theological starting point were based on the notion of “that of God within each
person”….not holiness, not superiority, not perfection, not ultimate authority,
just a spark of divine light.

There is a serious degree of infantilism in the “original
sin” and depravity concept, even neurosis or institutional psychosis, that puts
humans on a foreshadowed road of unworthiness, sinfulness, low expectations and
very high dependence and need. Of course, it follows that the hierarchical
institution, (father knows best) can then play penitential agent, exact a pound
of regret, remorse and correction, as the agent of God.

Think of the inverse potential. If man is a
creature/child of God, in whom God has placed his highest and best hopes and
aspirations, and in whom God trusts to emulate the pathway of instilling
justice, compassion, truth and reconciliation in each situation, regardless of
the geography, the economics, the politics, the sociology or the institutional
religion. Matthew Fox argues for the co-creator of a human life by the
individual human with God, long before this piece is being digitized. Others,
too, have faced the wrath of conventional Christian cultures by positing this
“radical” starting point.

And yet, it is the “radical” (that is extremely and
demonstrably different from the conventional secular ‘wisdom’ and practice in
the “world”) that can, indeed, ought to, signify the theory and praxis of a
faith worthy of the name, (and the discipline to follow). The world is filled
with individuals and organizations that perceive the world and their place in
it from a perspective of fear, powerlessness, weakness and sin. In comparison
with a “perfect” deity, of course, we are all of those things, and yet what
kind of God needs that kind of obsequiousness and self-effacement. Fear,
secrecy, chicanery and bullying are all dependent on a neurosis that has been
seeded and nurtured (perhaps unconsciously and innocently) by a structural
deficit of the source of light, compassion, tolerance and forgiveness.
Separating humans from full access to these reservoirs of “goodness” by the
inherent “hardwiring of evil” and then elevating some to the position of
“special access” is hardly a notion worthy of an omniscient deity. No matter
whether that access is through a penitential experience, of which there might
be many, in different forms for various individuals in specific circumstances,
or through a life of monastic discipline, or through epic acts of charity and
healing, or through the reconciliation of conflicting parties ( for example in
the corporate, the geopolitical, the racial, the economic divides that
proliferate), it is within each of us to be able to access such light in our
own lives in as agents if and when requested, in the lives of others.

The notion of salvation, clearly, merits a critical
examination. Some argue that through “conversion” and the submission to the
notion that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Saviour, one’s evil is washed away. So
the process is fundamentally an individual one, depending on the relationship
of the individual’s soul/spirit with God, through the mediation of Jesus
Christ’s life, death Resurrection and teaching. A changed relationship, through
the voluntary submission of the will of the individual, as a sign that God is
now in charge, signifies a new convert to the Christian church. And yet, if
that relationship were rather a birthright, into which one is born, through the
miracle of human love (obviously the ideal) and then taught the presence of
“that of God within” by those who espouse such a theological view, how would
that life, and the lives of those near and dear, be different.

Suspicion, fear, anxiety, and their surrogates hard
power, fighting skill, revenge, pay-back, armaments and political and economic
and hegemonic aggression dominate, and there is a religious and paradoxically
flawed distorted premise that infects how the world operates. And the Christian
church has a significant degree of responsibility for this inversion of both
what is possible and how our best selves would serve both God and humanity.
Another notion of salvation, for example, as considered by some, requires that
humanity be free from injustice, starvation, disease, and terror prior to our
claiming the ministry of the Christian church.

We all know the predictable “Oh My God!” expression
that leaps out of every mouth whenever a tragedy occurs. Whether it is a fire,
a drought, a missile, an extortion, a murder, a serious betrayal, a brutal
assault….these are all accompanied with the invocation of God’s name, in
disbelief. Such horror was not expected, and the prospect of living through it
seems beyond our human capacity. And a kind of “leaning” need not be seen as
dependence, merely a sign of vulnerability, and the need to invoke God’s
compassionate strength to help us through.

What if we were to hear, “Oh My God!” upon the first
glimpse of our new son or daughter, upon the new sunrise, upon the first
sighting of a snowy white owl, or the birth of a new puppy or foal? What if our
comfort level with the magnificence of both nature’s and human’s capacity for
creating were seen to be a gift from “that of God within”….and were the
reassurance that our goodness is more than equal to our capacity for evil, if
not stronger, more life-giving and more supportive of not only the mere physical survival of all humans on the
planet but of those traits and their gifts that demonstrate our shared capacity
for goodness.

Grovelling for our next pay-cheque, without a
minute-by-minute consciousness of our gift of supportive partners, friends,
honest and honourable supporting humans whose service is motivated and
undergirded by a similar theology of “light” (and not darkness of greed, fear,
suspicion, deception dissembling and the prominence/dominance of a need for
power OVER.

Is it not clearly evident that, given our past several
centuries, in which our lives have been twisted into a moral and ethical
pretzel, for which the only accounting has been to drive us back to the
perception/belief/self-fulfilling prophecy of “original sin” since it has been
so impregnated into both our consciousness and our unconsciousness, that it
might be time to take a new look at how our religion serves as a clear agent of
sabotage.

We are not more likely to “go to heaven” (based on the
potential existence of that part of our theology) after we die depending on how
strictly we have “painted our lives by the numbers assigned by the Christian
church”. The institution has so morphed (if indeed it began on a different
footing, which I doubt) into just another secular and highly political
institution…Some argue that with the “tithe” came the church’s transactional
character and universe, something proferred for something in return. The
problem is, was and always will be: God is not for sale. Forgiveness is not for
sale, just as relics were not to be sold, as expiation for one’s sins.

And while there may have been church apologists who
posited that universal, ubiquitous sin as the original state of every human
would not merely ensure a degree of humility and the need for forgiveness,
another of the many transactional equations for which the Christian church is
infamous, but also provide a certain measureable degree of control by the
clergy, whose job it would be to collect funds, while attending to the sick and
dying, marry those who “qualified” depending on the peculiar standards invoked
at any given time (all of them sliding as cultural mores dictated), burying and
commiserating with those struggling with grief, loss, brokenness and broken
relationships.

There likely were also other theologians who, rather
than becoming embroiled in such controversies as the Virgin Birth, or the
factual veracity of the Resurrection, or the literal import of the Garden of
Eden banishment as a consequence of disobedience to the word of God, were
focused instead on the primary characteristics of a healthy relationship
between an individual human and his/her God. Looking for those things that
“qualify” as sins is hardly a pre-occupation of any God whose primary gift is
love, compassion, tenderness and forgiveness. And neither is deputizing
(mostly) men, to do that work, as the primary focus of the institution seems to
these eyes, ears, imagination and faith to be such a reduction of the
super-ordinate scope of any deity.

“Unless you become like little children” does not and
need not translate into the kind of uncritical appreciation and apprehension of
the spirit of God’s word that would generate “life and that more abundantly”.
Little children have a sense of awe and wonder that, given both the premise of
evil and the practice of the “obsessive critical parent” an archetype the
Christian church eminently fills, apparently on each continent in which it
operates.

Critical parents are needy, for protection of their
offspring, for the appearance that they are a “good parent” in all of the many
“responsible” ways that such a definition holds. And, while some protection
from harm, physical and emotional, is appropriate in early years, that
protection ideally gives way, like a skin shedded, to a much more mature and
self-directed pattern of making decisions of all proportions. The more
“authority” abrogated by the critical parent (in human lives) the greater the
dependence of the child on that authority, if for no other reason that “to
avoid” the wrath that follows. Similarly, if God is depicted and worshipped as
the ultimate critical parent, then the potential development of autonomy is
severely restricted, if not fully impaired.

Surely, with a full band of sound and image waves
flooding the airwaves of our radios, televisions, laptops and newspapers, we
have come to the edge of a cliff, in that our capacity to absorb such a mountain
of moral, ethical and spiritual garbage has long since been reached. So while
we continue to feed the “voyeur” in each of us with evidence of human depravity
and evil, through billions of advertising dollars that are spent in the
statistical assurance there will be an audience, we all know that this uroborus
snake generates no positive change in the culture in which we attempt to raise
our children. Furthermore, we also know that we are quickly approaching another
cliff, the human limit to our capacity to endure the kind of political
“leadership” that has been foisted (through the instrument of the democratic
ballot box) on a public riven with angst, anger, anxiety, powerlessness and
hopelessness. The marriage of these ballots to the leaders they have produced
is a step too far, and even if the names and the faces of the leaders were
changed, we would still face a moral, ethical, and especially a spiritual
vacuum.

We are not only enabling greed, hypocrisy,
manipulation, the sacrifice of the careers and the literal lives of millions
who are being volunteered to go into the dark hole of military engagement, or
corporate profiteering, so that those in
charge can look “wonderful” as winning leaders offering unique pay-back either
in shared financial greed, or shared status. This is a totally vacuous rainbow
of a promise to young innocent and easily seduced men and women. And those
proferring its “promise” know full well the emptiness of their part of the
transaction.

We need the kind of modelling of truth-telling that is
currently excised from a religious institution bereft of spiritual direction
and spiritual purpose. We need the kind of power-sharing that is based on
authentic equality of every single person who happens to be in the circle of
the specific local, regional provincial or even national community.

And that
goes too for the international organizations whose survival once again depends
not on their unique contribution to the enhancement of the human condition, in
all of its many potholes, but on their capacity to raise funds to keep them
afloat.

Clearly, the human capacity to evolve has been
demonstrated in many ways over the
decades and the centuries. And it is time for the moribund Christian church to
embrace a theology of acceptance, tolerance, respect and equality in each of
its places of encounter. Recall it was Christians who supported slavery in the
South of the United States, a permanent black mark on its conscience and on its
reputation. It was also Christians like Martin Luther, the Germany theologian,
whose writings exhibit an attitude of anti-semitism that would be intolerable
today, but not until the holocaust spilled the blood and ashes of six million
on our shared Christian consciences, memories and institutional reputation.
Apartheid, too, has its Christian justification, as does the “inherent
savagery” of indigenous people in Canada, whose savagery was attacked frontally
by Christian missionaries and zealots.

Two versions of Christian theology sparked, and then
fueled the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, where hundreds of people were
killed, maimed, or broken in body and in spirit, in order to better fulfill
their commitment to their chosen church. Neither protestants nor Catholics have
any room to champion their attitudes, their beliefs, nor their viscious acts of
terror, all in the name of God.

Humans share an intellectual capacity, (emboldened by
formal education in the West) to identify by family name and phylum plants and
animals, and thereby to focus almost exclusively on their differences and the
human perception of dominance. The medical, legal, psychological, political and
sociological model of research looks for what is not working, and seeks the
remedies to repair that damage. However, there is another model of approach, the pastoral model.
Through this lens, the practitioner looks for “what is working” to the health
of the individual and/or the group and then works to enhance that strength to a
more full expression and additional healing.

This seemingly insignificant shift in initial
perception as to the identity of the person/organization demands a different
colour of lens through which to observe, a different attitude in the
professional and empathic approach, as well as a much less researched and much
more diverse range of approaches. James Hillman, a psychologist academic,
scorned his profession for veering too far into diagnostics and pharmacological
interventions, and advocated a biographic approach to human healing. Only the
biography, he argued, included all of the contributing factors, experiences and
traumas that collectively comprise the character of each human. And only though
a detailed, almost anthropological “dig” of the evidence in the memory vaults,
and the associates including the full exploration of the context, Hillman
argues, can a process for healing be begun and carried out.

Similarly, as far as one’s spiritual growth and
development, there is, and there can be, no escape from the full exploration of
the biographical details of one’s life.

Unfortunately, churches, like most
schools, hospitals and doctors, lawyers and social workers are so inundated
with caseloads that would sink the most buoyant ships, tend to look at the
presenting symptoms of any situation, declare a moral, ethical, medical or
legal “diagnosis” and consequent and pre-packaged therapy. It is far too
time-consuming, and thereby too costly, for ordinary mortals to take the time
to hear a full biographical account of how an individual got to this moment,
especially if this moment involves the
person’s having committed some misdeed, or become critically ill.

However, there is a critical and ghostly illness
wrapping its tentacles around the necks, the minds and the hearts and spirits
of millions of human beings….and it could be termed “existential death” through
moral, ethical, spiritual and an empathic deficit so deep and profound that, if
it acquired physical and financial dimensions (the primary way of understanding
any current reality), it would eclipse the budgetary deficits and debts of all
developed and developing nations.

Maybe, just maybe, the church has tried too hard to
“do” and to design and to impose both a structure for worship and even more
insidiously, a design and structure for the Christian life. And that impulse,
just possibly, has led to the “manufacture of rules, and even the manufacture
(in the intellectual, legal, moral and critical parenting sense) of evil.
Trying to “get it right” is a snail-step from the vain attempt at institutional
perfection, a disease that has, does and will continue to cripple all those who
attempt to reach its thankfully still mysterious heights.

And becoming swallowed up in a centuries-long armada
of individuals and institutions plying the holy waters of perfection, to their
individual and collective demise, and self-sabotage. Whether it is the manual
task of folding the white linen altar cloths, or holy-hand-waving in
sanctification of the elements of the Eucharist, or holding to personal sexual
chastity, as an act of obedience to God is a path fraught with innumerable
ethical, moral and spiritual dangers. First, it is not the business of a church
institution or its human leaders to invade my, or anyone else’s private life,
whether I am a parishioner or a clergy. On the other hand, should I seek out
the church’s guidance, discernment, counsel or even penitential, the onus
having then shifted to my personal responsibility, the church then has a
legitimate place to ask questions, and I have a legitimate option to answer or
not. The sacred within the individual, as a legitimate starting place, for both
the seeker and the institution, has many healing, healthy and spiritually
growth-enhancing.

Sharing the inner light between the seeker and the
community, eliminates a power imbalance that can and does produce only
infantile dependence. Stunted spiritual growth, as opposed to the fertility
that accompanies the full acknowledgement of the injustices inflicted upon each
person, as well as those inflicted by each person (and we are all bearing those
same permanent colours) is neither the long-term vision of salvation nor is it
the remedy to empty coffers and pews and Christian education classes.

And then there is the question of cash flow, for
operating expenses and investment accounts, and the methods deployed to
fund-raise are little more than imitations of the same techniques deployed by
not-for-profit charities. And that hierarchical implementation of power and
authority is, like the world in Alice in Wonderland, upside down. People who
know they are part of a community in which their “that of God within” is
acknowledged, honoured, respected and nurtured will be more than willing to
contribute in the spirit of gratitude, joy and celebration for the honour of
being part of something sacred, personal and spiritually stimulating. And if
the community does not either aspire to, or live into the shared, expressed
and community validated spiritual needs
of the people in its circle, and the money is not coming in, then the community
has to ask the really tough questions about how to find its shared path to seek
God.

And, of course, as with any group of people, all of
them facing their own emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual
hurdles, the community needs sacred places where such pain can be
confidentially shared, and even processed by others whose life experiences have
grown both understanding and empathy, (not necessarily of a clinical or even a
specifically pastoral way). One example worth considering is a “true friend”
within the community (a partner) or even a group of three among whom a level of
trust is fostered, nurtured and grown through sharing time and self.

There is that part of each of us, not only that of
God, but a darkness of unconscious memory or trauma that has impacted our lives
at the initial encounter, and more times when such pain erupted and spread its
toxicity often without our expectation and certainly without our control. In
other words, we are each wounded in different ways, and from this wounded part
we might seek healing, in whatever form that makes sense.

A community that trusts the process of mining the
truths and the “gold” of new insights and the new life that such mining offers
is in a place of open receptivity that can help to lift and burden and open the
“eyes” as wll as the heart and mind of the seeker.

The individual truths, secrets, pain, trauma and
alienation of each person in th circle can be the grist and the starting point
and stimulation for further reflection. And this process will need different
kinds of support depending on the pain and the person seeking healing.

No single person, not a clergy, a bishop or even a
primate is either needed nor recommended for a process in which all are willing
to participate, to support and to incarnate the mission of agape in the full
sense of that Greek word.

Safety, confidentiality, sensibility and empathic
compassion, while they may not be enough by themselves can provide the
greenhouse where other “lights” can appear and shed their own range of wattage.

And isn’t the finding and sharing of the “light” of
God ultimately the experience all Christians would like to share before
departing this orb?